Futurebirds
by Raihu
Summary: Marluxia x Naminé: Tomorrow is never today.


For **yell leader**. Completely and utterly.

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Futurebirds

The sky is conspicuously absent.

"That's right. But the very first thing you see is the darkness of a wing. Darkness for the astral temple, wings for flight. Remember that. It's hidden, not missing." Behind her, out of sight, Marluxia leers and strokes the violent angles of her shoulder blades. "I'm keeping it somewhere safe until I can be sure you won't fly away from me."

And she would fly, she would. Stretch out all her bones to gentle the prevailing winds, put all the distance in the world between herself and his hot, corrosive breath.

But there is no such thing as distance or the world; there is no sky, and her mouth fills with the taste of ash and static when she imagines being away from him. Cruelty defines. When he lays his sharp edges against her, she knows exactly what she is, why she is, where her flesh ends and the long silence begins.

"I won't," she decides softly. White fog feathers out from between her lips like a flared wing.

"Ah." A smile. Utterly false. "I know."

Like talons, his hands hook neatly into her. He is a dark shard of obsidian, unable to soothe or bring comfort. She wishes he would stop pretending that he wants it any other way.

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Once she has drawn the framework of their new kingdom, he will release the wind and clouds.

That's how he said it: _our kingdom, release the clouds_.

Then he had laughed. Tonelessly, because he could not remember the sound delight was supposed to make. It infected the gray wash of the anti-world with bolts of vocal disruption, and she had sidled away meekly, wishing that he wouldn't speak so loudly into so much emptiness. But even she had to smile a bit.

Marluxia tells such obvious lies.

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She sits alone very often in a windowless, white room. She is kept there because the single, white door is the only way in or out. She is alone because her paleness burns like an arctic whisper creeping down from the silent towers of ice; in the eyes, in the back of the mind. And, in any case, she does not know her own strength, so a lock and a delicate enchantment are enough to keep her contained.

Sometimes he will come to see her. This happens only rarely, and out of necessity.

Coiling beside her, a tendril of smoke, he will surround the slopes and contours of her body with his jagged shadow and say: "Naminé, you must draw a lovely gift for me."

She answers, always: "Let them go; just for a moment, only to see. I won't fly away."

"I know." He tells her this as if it makes any difference to him. Takes her fragile hands in his palm. "You're my little angel. Just one last drawing, and then we'll see."

Every time, this is what he says. Looking directly into his eyes, she does not believe him, but she draws, hunched over her papers and crayons with the ceiling looming severely overhead, a death mask for the open vistas of the atmosphere. She does this willingly, because angels are patient creatures with good hearts, and this more than anything else is what she would have wanted to be if the choice was hers.

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Wreathed in his trailing cloak of ash and sulfurous darkness, she sketches stone foundations and networked supports and the innards of fearsome, snarling machines at his direction. He watches occasionally, crooning and touching her back where the shoulder blades peak like vestigial wings.

Just one last drawing, and another thousand of a thousand years.

She accepts it. Infinitely patient. As determined to endure his deceptions as he is to deceive her.

And he, in his defence, can be benevolent. For a prince of shadows.

Whenever she begins to forget, he puts her in his coils and takes her out to see the sleek, pale limits of herself, cool as crystal in the floating mists; and he is the traitor, so that she can be the saint; and, even after all this time, he has the grace not to mention that – in all of her drawings of the world to come as he would like it – the sky is conspicuously absent.


End file.
